Blogged

November 14, 2008

While wingnuts looooove Sarah Palin, most of the rest of the country seems ready to bid her farewell. She herself seems determined to overstay her welcome. Some people just don't know when it's time to leave.

According to several reports, the Guild of Republican Govs didn't show any great enthusiasm for her.(DN) The consensus appears to be that she's "sucking up all the media oxygen." (HuffPost) Sadly for them, she is Sarah Palin. They are not. She's the darling of the base and Queen, King, and Jack of Alaska, and they're just interchangeable pasty middle-aged men in suits.

November 11, 2008

by Damozel | Can't say I'm surprised. I can't even say I'm disappointed because...well, this is who Obama is. Expect him to walk a middle path (to quote the I Ching), meaning one quite a bit to the right of where progressives would like him to be.

If Reid lets Lieberman keep his committee chair, progressives might well be "up in arms" as Nico Pitney and Sam Stein remark, but I reckon---and I say this with love---that progressives who voted for Obama might as well get used to finding him come up short in supporting the understandable (to this progressive) desire to wipe the slate clean.

We here at Buck Naked Politics supported Obama---some, like me, more fervently than others---but none of us ever mistook him for a progressive (which is why some people here were never that enthusiastic about him). His change meme has always been about the unity and the bipartisan action and the reaching across the aisle and the reconciliation.

November 08, 2008

by Teh Nutroots | First of all, what about the rumors that the anti-Palin movement was initiated by supporters of Romney who saw her as a 2012 threat? Ambinder musters them and debunks them, sort of. Whoever started the Palin blame-game, it can't be laid at the door of the Romney faction (or not exclusively).

Gov. Sarah Palin
of Alaska fired back Friday at the unnamed McCain campaign aides who
have been maligning her in recent days, saying that their criticism was
“cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional, and
those guys are jerks.” (NYT; emphasis added)

For years conservatives have been saying that racism doesn’t exist
anymore. The election of Barack Obama proves we were right all along.
Throughout the campaign we reminded people at every opportunity that
while it might be frightening that Obama is a socialist who pals around
with terrorists, probably wasn’t born in this country and is secretly a
Muslim, it made no difference whatsoever that he was black.... [I]n the end no matter what we threw at Obama, white people voted for him anyway. So with the election of Obama conservatives have been vindicated.

by Teh Nutroots | Times may be dark, my friends, and Bush might still be president, but the comical finger-pointing and red-faced apoplectic screaming among former allies of the far right seems bound to continue for yet awhile. Let's have a round of very slow clapping for our perpetually furious friends on the far right!

All the stories about Palin's wardrobe? Turns out---that is, if you want to believe Politico's Jonathan Martin, and you betcha I do---that it was all true, and much worse than you probably thought:

by Damozel | Earlier Teh Nutroots wrote about Reid's summoning of Lieberman to the woodshed. According to HuffPost's Nico Pitney, Reid wants Leiberman out and Leiberman's only shot at keeping his committee chair "appears to be lobbying members of the Senate Democratic Leadership
besides Reid. One key target would be the Senate Democratic Steering
and Outreach Committee, a group of nearly two dozen Democratic Senators who play a role in deciding committee seats."Pitney suggests that this isn't likely to work. "[I]t is highly unlikely that Democrats would act against the wishes of Majority Leader Reid." Not to mention their own. In fact, many of us among the rank-and-file have speculated that Reid really isn't that set on seeing the back of Joe Lieberman. There are political reasons for Reid to want to keep him around.

November 05, 2008

by Teh Nutroots | Ha, ha, this is rich. Right wing bloggers are masters of the maladroit reframe and the transparent revisionism. From the conduct of the loons at The Corner and as illustrated elsewhere, one can distill their entire M.O. and fit it into a nutshell. A wing-nutshell.

by Teh Nutroots | So it seems. But will Lieberman get spanked? Does it surprise you as much as it does me that we have to wait and see?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will likely meet later this week
with Joe Lieberman to discuss whether the Democrat-turned-Independent
will be stripped of his Senate committee chairmanship, a senior
Democratic leadership aide tells CNN.

November 01, 2008

She thought she was chatting with Sarkozy. It's kind of, well...sweet, if you asked me. If she weren't a right-wing nutjob, wouldn't we all love her? Which is why she's so dangerous. Most wingnuts are always outraged, all the time. Consider Coulter or the Malkin, both in a permanent state of bug-eyed rage.

Sen. John McCain has suddenly discovered a new boogeyman to link to
Sen. Barack Obama: a sometimes controversial but widely respected
Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi. In the past couple of days,
Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr.
Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia
University, to neo-Nazis; called him "a PLO spokesman"; and suggested
that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to
release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which
Mr. Obama spoke.

October 31, 2008

by Teh Nutroots | ...because by fulfilling the purpose of the first amendment calling her out on her negative attacks (including the straight-up lies), they are repressing her free speech rights. Who the hell knows what Palin means when she starts blathering about the many, many things she knows nothing about? Forget the Vice Presidency; I'd question, based on this, whether she's qualified to be governor of Alaska.

Can't someone in the McCain campaign please provide Sarah Palin with a pocket copy of the Constitution or something? Or at least access to Wikipedia? Or do John McCain and his campaign care as little about the constitution as George W. Bush, who infamously called it a "goddamned piece of paper"? This is high school civics, people. The Constitution says:

Lawrence Eagleburger, one of McCain's prominent supporters, served as Secretary of State under Bush 41. Though McCain and Palin love to drop his name (HuffPost via Memeorandum), apparently Eagleburger's not really down with McCain's veep choice. Like 59% of voters, he has doubts about Palin's preparedness:

October 30, 2008

by Cornertard | Oh noes! We just saw how Sarah "the Wealth Spreader" Palin REDISTRIBUTED WEALTH IN ALASKA! Et tu, John McCain?

Forgetting the massive tax cuts he's promised to allow to big corporations, he's now swearing, "When I'm President, we're not gonna let Exxon reap record profits"! Is John McCain's "socialist" tag as applied to Obama a case of "pot meet kettle"? See the video here!!!!!!!!!! (Via Memeorandum, see other bloggers react to this Hallowe'en shock/horror as McCain and Palin RIP OFF THEIR MASKS!!!!)

by Teh Nutroots | She might call Obama a socialist---but it turns out that socialism-hating real Americans who support Palin are in the tank for an ACTUAL wealth-spreading collectivist. From The New Yorker:

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama
“Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect
character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of
what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she
governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on
the oil companies that lease its oil fields.

October 28, 2008

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana
walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign
script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center
and one of their parents.

Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us
that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset
that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being
"dangerously weak on crime," "coddling criminals," and for voting
against "protecting children from danger...

In a previously uncovered interview from September 6, 2001, Barack
Obama expressed his regret that the Supreme Court hadn't been more
'radical' and described as a 'tragedy' the Court's refusal to take up
'the issues of redistribution of wealth.' No wonder he wants to appoint
judges that legislate from the bench."
--McCain economics adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin (WaPo)

October 27, 2008

by Damozel | For those of us who are not Republican---because those guys just instinctively know---reasonable right-winger Swift has created a handy chart.

Also--if you missed my previous note--you don't want to go another day without reading Swift's Great Moments in Election-Year Blogging, a celebration of the brave citizen journalists who dared to go, um, there. You won't want to miss a single link.

"The White House has asked the Department of Justice
to look into whether 200,000 new Ohio voters must reconfirm their
registration information before Nov. 4, taking up an issue that
Republicans and Democrats in the battleground state have been fighting
over in court for weeks."

How fascinating that President Bush now seems to be taking an interest in election irregularities. I mean, he did take the White House in 2000 largely because of election irregularities in Florida -- where, at the time, his brother was governor and one of his campaign co-chairs was our state's chief elections officer.

October 26, 2008

by Teh Nutroots | More goofiness from Sarah Palin, who doesn't realize that a little knowledge is a very little thing. Here she mocks the earmarking of funds for fruit fly research while arguing for more spending on autism.